CFUnited Blog

Below are the partial results to date for the 2015 State of the CF Union survey. If you missed the survey you can take it here. See how you compare with other CFML developers. Discover what most developers use for tools, languages, database and development methods.

Can you help? If you are on a ColdFusion list, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google group please share the survey so that we can get a more complete picture of the current State of the CF Union. Thanks!

I will announce the final results on Friday 4/10/15

Scroll right to see numbers and percentages, scroll down to view more results

Note that the results are batched processed so they may not include your votes immediately. Check back in a few hours if you want to be sure.

This entry was posted on March 30, 2015 at 8:44 PM and has received 2221 views. There are currently 0 comments.
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Below are the partial results to date for the 2014 State of the CF Union survey. If you missed the survey you can take it here. See how you compare with other CFML developers. Discover what most developers use for tools, languages, database and development methods.

Can you help? If you are on a ColdFusion list, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google group please share the survey so that we can get a more complete picture of the current State of the CF Union. Thanks!

I will announce the final results on Tuesday Feb 11th 2014.

Partial results

Scroll right to see numbers and percentages, scroll down to view more results

Note that the results are batched processed so they may not include your votes immediately. Check back in a few hours if you want to be sure.

This entry was posted on February 5, 2014 at 7:30 AM and has received 3394 views. There are currently 4 comments.
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Help us find out the State of the CF Union with this survey - what versions of ColdFusion do people use, what frameworks, tools etc. We will share the summary results and a report on the state of the union with everyone who completes the survey so that you can see how you compare with other CFML developers. That way you can stay ahead of what tools top developers are using today, what databases are hot and see if the project issues you have are common or unique.

Hey perhaps acting on the gap between where you are today and what you see in the survey report will get you that next promotion or new job. Or at the least make your next project more successful. Knowledge is power!

If you know ColdFusion and love doing tech support and like the idea of living in the heart of Europe then maybe this job in Germany with my friend David Tattersall of Intergral would be interesting. I visited their office over the summer and it is a great place to work and live. And only a short train or car ride from many cool places in Germany, France, and Italy so you can take advantage of the 24 vacation days per year! (That is on top of the 12 national holidays they have)

Note: the office language is English – it is not required that you speak German to work at Intergral. Assistance with relocation will be provided. For US applicant’s they will also provide assistance with getting the appropriate work VISA allowing you to work in EUROPE.

Do you want to protect your organizations reputation for quality on the web?

Then join us for this free webinar on moving from CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) hand coding all your SQL to DAL (database abstraction layer) using libraries and objects to move the data in and out of your database.

The webinar on "From CRUD to DAL and ORM in ColdFusion" is on Wednesday, March 6,2013 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST (10am - 11am PST and 6pm - 7pm GMT). The webinar will be an overview on how you can utilize
existing solutions to do the repetitive "CRUD" operations for you
leaving you free to concentrate on the more complex parts of your
code. The two solutions we'll be looking at DataMgr and the native ORM
capabilities of ColdFusion 9 and Railo 3.3. It will be approximately 60 minutes including time for Q and A. The webinar is free. You can register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/153049345 See you there!

DataMgr could be viewed as a competitor to an ORM approach - though it doesn't require the same types of interactions. While ORM solutions effectively change the perspective of development from database to object, DataMgr maintains the database perspective, but makes common database interaction code more concise and powerful.

ColdFusion ORM (Object relational mapping) is a programming framework that allows you to define a mapping between application object model and the relational database. In an object model, the application objects are not aware of the database structure. Objects have properties and references to other objects. Databases consist of tables with columns that maybe related to other tables. ORM provides a bridge between the relational database and the object model and in addition provides Database vendor independence,Caching, Concurrency and Performance optimization

John Whish has been working with ColdFusion since version 4.5. He is
the author of the ColdFusion ORM book and has spoken at cf.Objective()
and the Scotch on the Rocks conference on several occasions. To find out more about John visit www.aliaspooryorik.com

Thank you everyone who voted in the State of the CF Union 2013 survey. Despite some worries ColdFusion is alive and well with a new version released since the last survey 3 years ago, and another in the works. I noticed that many folks are not on the latest version of CF and are yet to adopt a framework. However CFC use is nearly universal. And open source products such as CFEclipse, MySQL and Railo are used by about half of developers. Group learning resources such as user groups and conferences are used by about half of developers (down a bit since last survey).

Here are some of the interesting things I learned from the detailed results:

Three quarters of developers are using CF9, with about half that number using CF10. This is a similar adoption curve as 3 years ago for CF8/9

If you are running CF7 or earlier you are behind the curve

Just over quarter of developers are using the open source Railo ColdFusion, little change from 3 years ago

More than half are using Enterprise CF (vs Standard). The ratio of Ent/Std is little changed from 3 years ago.

80% run on Windows. Same as 3 years ago.

A 30% use Fusebox with other frameworks FW/1 and ColdBox the second and third most used. Fusebox, Model Glue and Mach-II have declined in use over the past 3 years, ColdBox about the same and FW/1 has increased in use. However the most popular "framework" is No Framework at all.

While nearly everyone uses CFCs just less than half use ColdSpring or similar to organize their CFC and only one in three do data via CFCs using ORM. These are respectively slight and substantial increases in dependance injection and DAL use over 3 years ago.

UDFs, Custom tags and CFIncludes are still as popular ways to reuse code as they were 3 years ago but still a little behind CFCs in popularity.

Most developers have used CF for more than 10 years and 90% use object orientation

CFers are heavily multi-lingual - using Java, PHP and .Net in large numbers. These languages are in similar use by CFers as 3 years ago, where as Flex and AIR use has declined by about half over this time period.

SQL Server remains the database of choice, with MySQL closely following. Oracle and Access runners up. All except Access are used by similar percentages as 3 years ago, with a moderate decline in Access use.

Half of developers use subversion, and Git is now used by a third (up since 3 years ago). But the same 20% as 3 years ago of developers don't do source code control at all.

CF Builder, Dreamweaver and CFEclipse are the top tools, all used by a similar number of developers. CFEclipse is down in use a bit over 3 years ago.

Half of developer attend a local user group some of the time, which is down over 3 years ago.

CF.Objective() is the most attended conference by CF developers, followed by MAX. Overall conference attendence is down as a percentage of respondees.

The top challenges facing developers today is too much work, followed by maintaining someone else's badly written code and integrating with legacy apps and security issues.

And the winner of the copy of FusionReactor is Paul Ihrig of Columbus OH. If you need to get on top of your backlog of work, learn new CF features, meet ORM gurus then check out our developer webinar series.

This entry was posted on February 12, 2013 at 9:38 PM and has received 5653 views. There are currently 4 comments.
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Help us find out the State of the CF Union with this survey - what versions of ColdFusion do people use, what frameworks, tools etc. We will share the summary results with everyone so that you can see how you compare with other CF developers. Thanks for your time completing this survey!

Update: we will draw one person at random from all the survey entrants to win a copy of FusionReactor 1 YR Standard license (a $249 value). (Must provide email to be entered in drawing. You can still take the survey without providing email if you prefer to contribute to the results.

We will announce the final results on the day of President Obama's State of the Union address, Feb 12th

Survey Q and A

I got some questions after posting the survey.

Q: why is this survey appearing here,of all places.

A: The previous state of the union surveys were on CFUnited.com so I just copied and edited the blog entry on there. Didn't realize that this might be confusing to some. Also I am planning to post CF developer and upcoming developer webinar related posts on cfunited.com, so made sense to put the survey here.

Q: The site is still "about" CFunited even though the event has not happened in 3 years, might confuse some folks. Are you giving any thought to revising the site to remove current conference event references (like register, pricing, topics, tracks, schedule, travel)?

A: Great suggestion, we will remove those (might take a bit of time to redo the graphics). I want to keep all the past presos and other historical CFUnited content. And not have the site be confusing.